Senior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I'm working on myself to perform like a senior software engineer at a FAANG company, and by doing your courses and following you on youtube, I understand that being a good at debugging is one of the greatest qualities.

But I am facing couple of problems.

• I work in a project where the technical debt is huge, the documentation is complicated (sometimes in code, sometimes on google drive, sometimes in the form of an algorithm written in French by a non-technical person).
• Only people who have been working with code for 3 years or more seem independent (And they only have time for themselves), thus, many of us sometimes feel lost.
• A lot of money has already been invested and it is in production. So no time to rewrite the services, where more than 100 people contributed.

Do you have any advice or steps to deal with this type of problem? I know that among the FAANG there is a 0% chance of having this case, but still, any advice will mean a lot to me.

Hi all, I'm prepping for a behavioral interview and have gone through the courses on behavioral interviews and communication. They were both super helpful, so thank you for that!

I was wondering if anyone has developed any ideas for how to respond to a great weakness. Often, it feels like people use this as an opportunity to humble brag (e.g. "I don't take enough breaks", "I can fixate on a problem too hard", etc.). Maybe these are terrible examples...

In the past, I've gone with "I don't multitask" because I mostly try to focus on one task before moving on to another. But I also don't want this to land poorly when interviewing at a startup.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

I’d like to convert my internal system of progress into a checklist and then share it with my manager. For example, I’m learning about logging. A question to measure my own progress is to check if I know what information should be logged? What about security considerations? If someone asks me about logging in 2 months, can I unblock them?

For the past 3 months, the primary activity on my team has been to debate and discuss the architecture design of the large system our team will be developing in Q3. It feels like we’re in gridlock and I don’t see a clear path to a decision. How can we move forward productively?

hi,

I just started. I've never been at a company this big. I have worked at a 1000 person place before it shrunk (it grew from 3-500 while I was there) and 65 and 500 person shops.

How do you suggest I ramp up? It's so many people and so many layers of code and tech. I have a good amount of experience in data/ml and also eng. I don't think I'm a 10x engineer but I am pretty proficient at getting things done.

What should my plan be even with holiday slow down coming? People are super nice and I don't feel crazy pressure to ship something rn but I put a lot of pressure on myself and want to do well.

I also know code quality is even more important at bigger companies trying to deal with scale. How do I make sure I can keep up?

Hi All, I have a question on competing offers. Do recruiters ask to show the competing offer email or letters when I negotiate? I read it is not legal to ask for it or ask for the previous salary. I wanted to find out more on this, do they ask for more details of competing offers and should I plan to show any details for that?  Also, would you mind sharing your experience on how you handled negotiation when trying to switch teams within the same company and negotiating a better salary within same company with an competing offer from outside the company. Thank you!

Sometimes people forget to follow up on their Action Items from meetings. They sometimes misremember meeting decisions as well. To mitigate this, I usually take detailed meeting notes in Google Docs and tag people on the Action Items they're responsible for. However, we don't always have meeting notes (e.g., for an ad hoc situation). What are some best practices for avoiding misunderstandings?

I've seen multiple E6s point out flaws in others' proposals, but don't offer any alternatives of their own. What's a good way to navigate this? This is extra tricky when we're on the same team and they're the designated code reviewer for my work.

Example: I ran into a limitation with a 3rd-party SDK. I proposed 2 options as workarounds, but an E6 rejected both options due to their limitations. When I asked him for his recommendation, he could not provide any alternatives but still insisted that I find a solution without any limitations. Thankfully an E7 on another team helped me by providing a viable workaround after 3 E6s were stumped by this problem. What should I do if I'm not lucky enough to have an E7 help me next time?

I had a question on how does one exhibit impact and staff level behavior as a Senior engineer.

The staff engineers on the team code as much as me. Although I am a lead for a team, there is distinction between me and how another lead is being perceived. I am happy for them.

They have been in the company way longer, they advocate, question and are not afraid to speak up.

But code wise, I have way more commits. We are both leads, but I can tell they are on the way to becoming staff, and it is the behavior. I am not able to put a pin on it.

How can we be perceived of being extremely valuable and influential to the team without crunching code.

I was wondering how would one handle situations where a manager makes up a feedback based of half information (or their perception) or even misinformation from others.

There are also no actions attributed to this feedback.

for eg. Person X have to learn how to manage up or navigate office politics or learn how to work well with other. But how? And who are these others?

When asked an example of why this feedback was given, they don't have any good example of what happened ,who said what and why was the feedback not given in the first place.

I know this is not something I can control, and in their mind of course they are giving actionable feedback.

The other part of it when you are surprised by the feedback even after asking for it in every 1:1 before (in my situation my manager was out for most of the time).

It just feels that why did I even work so hard in the first place and a little demotivated.

During my recent job search process, I couldnt time my interviews well, so i ended up securing offers at different times. My first offer was from a high speed startup and they offered me a very good pay.

The recruiter was very pushy though. She gave me a weekend to decide whether to accept the offer or not. She got to know about my last working day in my current org and pushed me to join a day after that. She also said i should not interview at any other companies if i sign this offer. She insisted i meet with my potential boss at the office and do so only if i am 100% sure of accepting the offer.

She was not just pushy, she was disrespectful and crossed a lot of boundaries. It was my first job offer and i couldnt give a definite yes. Also i felt really uncomfortable with how pushy she was and rejected the offer. I thought i couldnt focus on other interviews with this guilt and fear hanging over me if i accepted the offer without being 100% sure.

Before deciding to say no i also looked up culture reviews about this company and it scared me about how poor the work life balance is. I made a snap decision cos i was afraid for my health having worked at a startup before. But now i know that most reviews online are negative and ist so for every single company out there. Plus i am actually ok with such a high speed environment especially for high pay and good work. So i no longer care for these reasons.

Its been a week since then and i think i should have played this a bit more smartly. I should have said yes and continued to interview. Am i right in thinking this way ? Is there any other way to approach this sort of a situation ?

Background Context

About 7.5-8 YOE, worked at a F500 before and a med tech startup before that. I'm an iOS Developer to be more specific.

I recently joined Apple as an ICT4/Senior SWE, and this is my first time joining FAANG. So far I’ve been assigned a couple of basic tickets which I landed ahead of schedule, and my manager is unsure of what I’ll be focusing on as Apple is wrapping up its last week of feature dev for the year.

I am extremely stressed. And honestly, for no reason other than I’m placing this stress on myself. I feel like I need to prove to my team and manager that I am in fact a senior level engineer, but since I am already at the level I guess there’s no need to? My colleagues who are mostly all a level below have been on this team for years and obviously can code circles around me. What I’m failing to find is what Rahul and Alex call “the engineer who everyone gravitates towards” on my team. I don’t think we have a dedicated Staff Eng, but rather a few senior SWEs (and even that I’m not sure of since everyone’s title is hidden), and honestly I have no idea what the expectations are of me, and I think that also attributes to my stress levels.

My manager says to just sit tight and has given me a few tickets that are supposed to help my designated Apple buddy - who has been amazing btw - and these tickets are fine and all, but I guess I’m just not sure if I can actually perform at the senior level at FAANG. From all the videos on Taro it seems like at the senior levels there’s a lot of leadership and design going on (which held true at my last company), but frankly in the past couple weeks I’ve been here, I’ve only seen engineers across all levels chugging out code as fast as they can (maybe that’s something specific to Apple).

Not sure if Apple just values "solver" archetype or if this is normal and that it's going to just take me a few months to ramp up and get used to everything. I think there's also quite a bit of imposter syndrome going on - I know I deserve to be here, I just need time to deliver more work and for my manager to give me some feedback.

I know I'm very fortunate to be in the position that I am, but I just want to take care of my mental health while doing the past I can to make sure I'm taking care of my career.

Prior to Twitter, I was a mid-level engineer at another large tech company, so I was expecting to be leveled at mid-level again when joining Twitter. However, I did very well on the interview, so they up-leveled me to senior as a very pleasant surprise.

I know that I got this great feedback, but I feel like there's so much to learn and many gaps in my skills and can't help but feel sometimes that I shouldn't be at this level. Any advice on how to have a better mental state here?

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My EM's pushing me to lead projects on our team so I can work on getting to E6. This is challenging when the E6 on my team tries to micromanage everything. How do I lead when I keep getting overruled? The E6 usually makes good decisions, but oftentimes struggles to articulate his rationale / justification.

Suboptimal work efficiency resulted in me putting so much time at work, leading to poor WLB @Meta. I don't want to repeat it @ Pinterest. How can I improve my efficiency?

Hello, I have 3 years of experience and I'm an SDE II at Amazon. The Q1 promotion results are out, and I'm surprised to see many fast-track SDE III promotions. It seems to me that when the time is right and stars align, SDE III promotion can be quick, and if you stay in one team long enough, it wouldn't be hard to get to SDE III.

80% of my team are SDE IIs, and I don't see my possibility of SDE III promotion in the next 2 years unless:

1. I find some big opportunities that bring huge revenue to the organization
2. There's a major reorg, and I'm assigned to a new team, and the new team expands
3. My current team shrinks for some reason, I stay, and my team grows again. Interestingly, my team's senior manager and 2 senior engineers actually fall into the third bucket.

What do you think? Should I just relax, keep pace, and grow my skills, hoping for a promotion by job hopping when the market recovers?

The project I worked in for the year is getting deprioritized and I am looking for new teams to work in for the next half. Since PSC is coming next month and I am expecting relatively better ratings.

Q1- should I look out for new teams now. have chats with them and switch by next year once ratings are locked? Would managers wait?

Q2 - when is the good time to let my manager know that I will be looking for new teams?

Q3- If I let my manager know now, will it impact my psc results negatively?

Q4 - how to make the best use of time till psc results are locked?

Hi all,

In the next couple days (2-3 days) will be the deadline for my current job offer (let's call it "Company 1"). I already asked them for extension twice and they said next Monday (02/12) would be the final date and the offer cannot be extended further. The best thing about this offer is the company is fully remote, but it's a startup with unknown plan for IPO.

There is another company (publicly-traded company - let's call it "Company 2") that I already finished the interview with good feedbacks, but HR told me the hiring manager literally interviewed me as the very first candidate and would want to have 2 more weeks to interview other candidates too, but I'm in the pipeline for consideration.

Should I accept the offer from "Company 1" (the startup above)? WLB seems to be better than the "Company 2". Both companies offer "Unlimited PTO" (for better or worse) but at least the 1st is fully remote.

For comp number, the publicly-traded "Company 2" definitely has higher total comp and their stock is skyrocketing in the market right now. "Company 1" has higher base salary but paper stocks.

I wonder if the hiring manager for "Company 2" is interviewing further, does that mean my positive feedback was good but not great? Should I keep interviewing or just accepting 1st offer? Any thoughts on what to do next?

US has a lot of big tech and startups. India has seen some growth in recent past as well. What are other locations worldwide where one can propel their career with good compensation and growth ?

I am thinking about this, more from a long term perspective, in terms of getting a Permanent Residence and moving with my family there.

I have been contemplating this switch for a while, but have concerns related to the following:

1. Are TPMs more prone to lay-offs?
2. How tough is the switch from TPM back to SDE in case I don't like the TPM role later?
3. Are TPMs less respected than SDEs? I have this fear that this switch might be career suicide for me.

I’m considering leaving a startup because of 2 things I’ve seen on Taro:

1. faang+ as a long term investment in your career
2. .

2019 Goal of Joining a Startup

• Learn a lot about how to be a good software engineer

• Be an early employee at a startup that makes it big

• Quickly become an Engineering Manager because I like working with people, helping others

2023 Thoughts on Staying as an Eng Manager or Joining Big Tech

• Dream of being an EM, is happening on small start up scale with a growing number of reports who like my management so far

• The dream is to be early at a unicorn and that is close, but

  • The new standard should be 10B not 1B

  • Doing this with a first job is not necessary and high risk

• In 2-4 years I’d likely still be a engineering manager from a no-name startup

• L5+ engineer in big tech may fit well with my personality right away based on Taro, where I love collaboration, helping people, product and technical challenges

  • I like not just spending 80% of my time heads down coding and that may be possible and expected right away in big tech, no need to be a manager

• Getting a 2 FAANG+ badges on my resume over the next 4 years would be more way more worth it than even a million dollar payout from a startup

  • Could have many doors opened for high level roles at startups OR faang depending on what I feel like at the time

  • Big tech stock offer may also easily be worth 1M in 4 years

Priorities 2019

• Supportiveness of team

• Growth opportunities

• Company prestige

• Maximum outcome (Risk)

• Compensation

• Company ethics

• Product space

• Technical space

• Work-life balance

• Level/title

• Benefits

• Location

• Stability

• Remote work

Priorities 2023

• Supportiveness of team +0

• Work-life balance +7

• Compensation +2

• Company prestige -1

• Growth opportunities -3

• Stability +7

• Company ethics -2

• Remote work +6

• Level/title +1

• Benefits +1

• Location +1

• Product space -5

• Technical space -5

• Maximum outcome (Risk) -10

Taro priorities video is

Startup Stats

• 150 people, 25 engineers (doubled from a year ago)

• Fall 2021 had 50% investment at 250M valuation

• Dec 2022 450M valuation

• Revenue has since doubled in last year to 125M

• Profitable per years with 20% gross margin

• Growing industry

• Not venture backed, so not expecting 20x growth

• Estimated in 2-4 years to sell for 1-2B

How to evaluate a startup video

Current job stats

• Team lead for a year after 2.5 years as Software Engineer

• 0.1% equity, 100k cash

• 18th employee, 4th engineer

• Dream of being an early employee at a unicorn, seems close

• Would lose all stock if I leave before acquisition/ipo

• Biggest point for discussion: ***2-4 years of being manager at a small startup may not qualify me to be an EM in big tech***

FAANG+ Offer

• L4 equivalent

• 190k cash, 350k stock over 4 years, 60k sign on bonus

• Work life balance is supposed to be great

• Great food, big tech lifestyle that I’ve always heard/dreamed about

• Would work to be promoted to L5 in 1-2 years, then manager a year after that.

• Being a new person at a fresh company sounds very exciting now, I know the business fully and the tech stack of the current place to the point where many things Ive see before and feel stale/boring

Questions

1. Based on my write up about values, priorities, liking collaboration, would I like being an IC L4 coming from being a manager where I have solid tech skills but strong soft skills that I enjoy using.

2. If I stay at the start up would I be able to get a big tech EM offer with 3-4 years of management experience at the start up? Note this question shows what I’m learning now as a manager.

3. Should I down level myself from L5 to L4 if I think I could get the offer at L5 but am not sure about the certainty of success? (Question asked separately )

To put this into context, the question refers more to people who have already been at the company for a while, not onboarding engineers.

In my experience working only at startups, almost all learning has been the responsibility of the employee. There is a "spike" period where the engineer is given time to come up to speed, but it has always seemed to me a bit careless for managers to just give someone a list of technologies and say "learn this."

I guess this question is really a proxy for asking: how does FAANG approach "bootcamping" engineers on a new and important stack? Are workshops, training courses, and L&D actually effective? Suppose that I am a senior engineer who wants all the junior engineers in my team to learn how to use AI assist tools like Copilot, how would I approach making this mandatory if I really think it's a technology that's as crucial as git?